The storm had settled into a rhythm, but it was far from gentle. Rain hammered the roof and windows in relentless sheets, and every so often a burst of wind rattled the frames like a warning. They'd closed the blinds earlier while getting the clinic ready, sealing the office into a half-dark cocoon. The only glow came from Eli's flashlight on its lowest setting, turned toward the floor so the light diffused along the tiles and didn't bleed through the slats.
Eli sat cross-legged with his back to the wall, one hand unconsciously bracing his bandaged side. The ache of the day—of multiple fights, too much running, too much bracing—had settled deep in his bones. Every time thunder rolled, he felt it in his ribs like an echo of impact.
Paolo twisted the electric kettle's cord between his fingers, rolling it over and over like a worry bead. The kettle wasn't theirs, not really; they'd found it in the clinic kitchen downstairs while they were getting the place ready for the night. They'd rinsed it out, filled it with water, and brought it up like contraband treasure. In a world that had slipped out of shape, the promise of hot water felt like a win that mattered.
"What do you think it was?" Paolo asked at last. His voice was tentative but steady. "The siren. You think it's, like… the government? A signal? Or maybe a distress call?"
Eli dragged a hand down his face. Sleep hadn't claimed him yet, though his body begged for it. His mind stayed taut and clear, a wire pulled too tight to break. "I don't know," he said quietly. "Could be either. Could be both."
Paolo tilted his head. "Both?"
"Could be someone calling for help. Could also be someone telling us to stay away." Eli's jaw tightened. "That's the thing about signals—you never really know unless you made them yourself."
Paolo leaned back against the wall, his knee bouncing lightly against the floor. "Still… it means someone else is out there. Alive."
"Or it means someone else is dead." Eli's tone was flat, but his eyes flicked toward Paolo, gauging whether the boy could hold the weight of it.
Paolo's mouth pressed into a thin line. He didn't argue. For a while the rain filled the silence, a hard, endless scrape of sound against the glass.
The kettle clicked off. Paolo perked up and reached for it, relief flickering across his tired face. He poured carefully into two waiting cups of instant noodles. Steam curled up, soft and thin; the faint scent of broth joined dust and storm, almost comically normal.
"We grabbed this from the kitchen downstairs at the right time," Paolo said, as if the kettle itself might hear him and agree. "Water too."
"Mm," Eli answered, accepting the cup. The heat seeped into his fingers and steadied him in some quiet way.
They crouched close to the desk, heads bent over their cups. Paolo peeled back his lid and whispered, "Thanks."
Eli nodded and tore into his noodles with silent focus.
For a while, the only sound was their eating, the faint slurp and click of chopsticks absurd against the storm's fury. Paolo slurped, restless, then muttered, "Feels strange, huh? Eating noodles while the world's falling apart outside."
"Better than starving," Eli said, not unkindly.
Paolo huffed, chewing faster. "Yeah, but still. Kinda feels like a crime, eating something hot. Like… I don't know. We don't deserve it."
"You'll think differently if we run out of food tomorrow," Eli replied, lifting the cup.
Paolo made a face. "Way to ruin the one nice moment we have."
"It's the truth."
"Yeah, yeah." Paolo leaned back, noodles dangling from his chopsticks. "I used to complain about canteen food at school. Guess I'd sell my left arm for a plate of that now."
"Eat faster," Eli said. "No one's buying your arm."
Paolo snorted. "You're a real comfort, you know that?"
Eli didn't answer. He blew on his noodles and took another mouthful, the heat burning his tongue and settling somewhere deep.
Paolo's eyes drifted to the corner near the supplies. "You still haven't opened your Coke."
Eli's chopsticks paused. "So?"
"So," Paolo grinned faintly, "you're saving it, aren't you? Like it's treasure."
"It's sugar and carbonation."
"Exactly. Treasure." Paolo nudged the bottle with his knuckle. "Come on, one sip. Might be the last Coke in the city."
Eli eyed him, unamused, and went back to eating.
Paolo smirked. "Fine. When you die, I'm taking it."
"You'd die trying."
Paolo snickered and slurped the rest of his noodles noisily just to annoy him. The sound almost broke Eli's patience, but instead he let out a short exhale—something like a laugh, thin but real. It softened the room in an almost invisible way.
They ate in silence for another stretch. The storm pressed in heavier, wind whistling through some unseen gap, a high thin thread of sound.
Paolo stirred the broth with his chopsticks, then asked, "You think the siren means there's a base somewhere? Like a safe zone."
"If there is," Eli said, "it's not close."
"You can tell by the sound?"
"I can tell by how it felt in the floor." He glanced at the window, as if the city beyond the blinds might answer. "It carried. But not like a car alarm. More like… industrial. Big. Far."
Paolo mulled that over, then nodded slowly. "Could still be people. Trying to organize. Right?" He looked toward the kettle, as if it might have an opinion. "Or it could be those things. Drawing us out."
"We're not going anywhere tonight," Eli said.
"Wasn't suggesting we sprint into the rain." Paolo lifted his cup and drained the last of the broth, then grimaced at the salt hit. "Just… feels better thinking there's someone else. Feels worse thinking the only things making noise are the ones that want to eat us."
Eli didn't answer. He set his empty cup aside and reached for his phone.
The screen woke without hesitation—battery icon solid, fully charged. He'd left it tethered to the power bank earlier, watched it crawl up to a full green square while they prepped the rooms and brought the kettle up. Signal bars wavered in the corner now, two, then one, then three again, then flickering down like a breath held and released. For a second or two he had enough to load old notifications.
The message from earlier sat there, unread in the way that mattered. He opened it anyway. The words didn't change; they just rearranged themselves in his head like they did every time he looked, meaning crawling under his skin and not letting go. His thumb hovered over the keyboard and didn't move.
A raindrop—or maybe the building's shiver—tickled the pane. The bars wavered again. He stared until the screen dimmed, then woke it again, as if that would force clarity. It didn't.
Paolo had been watching him in the reflection off the desk's metal edge. "Still fluctuating?" he asked quietly.
"Yeah."
"Same message?"
Eli clicked the screen off and set the phone face down. "Same."
"You going to—"
"No."
Paolo raised both hands, palms up. "Right. Not my business."
They let the storm talk for them for a minute. It wasn't comfortable, exactly, but it wasn't hostile either. The silence felt like a truce.
"So," Paolo said finally, "what do we call them?"
Eli looked up. "Who?"
"The… things." Paolo grimaced. "Creatures. I hate that word. Sounds like a five-year-old drew something awful with crayons and we're all pretending it's not real. Doesn't fit."
"Don't know what else you'd call them," Eli said.
"Well," Paolo said, brightening with the restless need to make meaning out of nonsense, "we should name them. Helps. Makes them less… huge."
"Names don't change what they are."
"No," Paolo allowed. "But they change how we talk about them."
Eli's mouth twitched. "Go on, then."
"Obscurant," Paolo said, almost shy with it. "That's what I'll call them. Fits, doesn't it? They're dark. Clouded. Hidden. Like they're built to smother the world."
Eli repeated it under his breath, testing the shape of it. "Obscurant."
"Sounds better than 'creature' or 'the things,' right? And if I die, at least don't let people say, 'He got taken by a creature.' That's too boring. 'He fell to an Obscurant'—that's got a little poetry."
"You planning on dying soon?" Eli asked, dry.
"Nope. But if I do, please give me a cool posthumous headline." Paolo shot him a quick grin. "Or just say I choked on my own jokes. That works too."
Eli shook his head. "Eat your noodles."
"Already did."
"Then stop talking about your obituary."
Paolo tilted his head back against the wall and exhaled. "Back in school we had this dumb club. We renamed everything. Stray cats, that one janitor with the mustache, the cafeteria's gray stew. It made boring days less… heavy." He flicked the empty chopsticks. "Feels the same now. Naming something makes it a little less impossible."
Eli didn't answer at first. The word moved through him anyway, lodging in some space he'd been trying to keep empty. Obscurant. It was too neat, too tidy, and somehow it fit. It made the shape of what he'd seen easier to hold, even if it didn't make it easier to survive.
Paolo set his empty cup down, then tapped the Coke with a finger. "Last attempt. We make a toast?"
"To what?"
"To surviving dinner."
Eli stared at him. "We don't open it tonight."
Paolo rolled his eyes. "Fine. To not opening it tonight." He lifted his empty cup like a ceremonial chalice. "May the sacred Coke remain sealed, amen."
Against his will, Eli's mouth twitched again. "You're an idiot."
"Certified." Paolo lowered the cup with mock solemnity. "But a hydrated idiot."
Thunder shouldered across the sky, close enough that the floor hummed under them. Paolo flinched and masked it by fussing with the kettle, coiling the cord carefully. "We really did luck out with this," he said, half to himself. "Kitchen downstairs, kettle still working, water still running—"
"Store what you can," Eli said. "Assume it stops tomorrow."
"Right," Paolo said, sobered. He nodded toward the stacked jugs near the cooler. "We'll fill the rest when the storm eases. Or in the morning."
"In the morning," Eli said, and made it sound like a plan instead of a hope.
They fell quiet again. The room felt smaller with the storm pressing in, but the heat from the noodles lingered and the ritual of eating had reset something, even if only for a moment.
"You should rest first," Paolo said suddenly.
"I'll take first watch," Eli said, just as quickly.
"You've been through hell today," Paolo said, firmer than before. "More than me. You fought those things—what, three of them? Four? And you're still bleeding in places you haven't checked. Don't argue. You need sleep."
"I can still—"
"No." Paolo's gaze held, steady in a way that surprised even him. "I'll wake you if anything happens. Promise."
Eli weighed a dozen answers and found none worth the energy. The fight in him was stubborn, habitual. But exhaustion dragged at him, heavy and insistent. He let out a breath and nodded once. "Fine."
He shifted toward the corner where their supplies were stacked—boxes, bags, the cooler, the Coke bottle he refused to open. As he eased down, his ribs protested. He swallowed the sound and settled on his side, one arm tucked under his head, the other resting protectively near the gear as if his body could guard it even in sleep.
Paolo adjusted the flashlight so only the faintest glow touched the room. He sat facing the window, posture stiff, hands restless. Every time lightning flashed, it painted the blinds a thin pale white, like bones under skin.
Eli lay still, eyes half-open for a while. The siren echoed in his memory—not the sound, but the shape of it, how it had cut through rain and thunder and turned the city into something listening. He reached for his phone again before he could stop himself.
The screen woke to full charge and a fickle dance of signal bars. Two. One. Three. Two again. The message waited, patient and merciless. He opened it because he couldn't not. The words were the same as before; the meaning was the same bruise. He hovered over the keyboard anyway, thumb poised. For one heartbeat the signal steadied as if holding its breath with him.
He typed a single word. Stared. Deleted it. Locked the phone and slid it beneath his pack like hiding it could hide what it contained.
"You good?" Paolo asked without turning.
"Yes." The word came too fast and too sharp.
"Okay." Paolo's voice was gentle enough to make it worse. He didn't push.
Minutes stretched. The storm shouldered on. Paolo shifted once, adjusting his grip on the flashlight; Eli's eyes drifted shut and opened, fought the pull and finally lost. Sleep didn't come cleanly. It took him in snatches, let him go, took him again. He floated there, halfway, the word Paolo had given them snagging on the edges of his thoughts.
Obscurants.
In the space between thunderclaps, the name felt right. Not because it explained anything, but because it gave the darkness a border, however thin.
He slept at last.
Paolo kept watch, listening to rain and wind and the small sounds of a building that had outlived its purpose. He kept his eyes on the window and his ears tuned to the hallway, breath held at every distant creak. Once, when the signal bars on Eli's phone pulsed faintly under the pack—one bright speck of light in the dark—Paolo looked over and then away, pretending he hadn't seen.
He reached for the kettle without plugging it in, just to hold something solid. "We got you from downstairs," he whispered to it, ridiculous and soft. "So don't quit on us."
The kettle, being a kettle, said nothing. The storm had plenty to say on its own.
Somewhere beyond the blinds, the city rearranged itself in the rain. Inside the office, two people pretended they weren't listening. The siren didn't return, but the memory of it sat in the room like a third presence, thin and electric, waiting.
Paolo breathed in, breathed out. He kept the flashlight low and the promises he'd made lower. He thought of names and the power they might have, even if it was only to make the night hold still. He thought of morning like it was a place they could walk to.
Eli slept on, finally, the line of his jaw unclenching by degrees. His hand rested near the Coke bottle he wouldn't open and the phone he wouldn't answer, like both were anchors in opposite directions.
The rain never let up. But for now, inside the office, nothing else moved.